Difference between revisions of "Faraday Cage"

Latest revision as of 11:07, 3 September 2021

XCOM:_Gray_Dawn#Recaps
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When we last left off...

Game #18 10/04/14

Day 19-21

Faraday Cage

Several members of the strike team are still injured following the battle in Westport. Three days pass while AJ, Marie and Carville recuperate at the development park. Carville briefly checks himself out to take care of a special mission. It is the tail end of winter, they are over two weeks into the sweeps, and he needs to find a flower; tomorrow is a special day.

Fayth arrives at the medical center the next day to check on her patients, part of her daily routine. After this, she will check in with the research team at the bunker. She is approached by Master Sergeant Carville, veteran of Iraq, Afghanistan and Bosnia. His twenty years of military service and all the battle-hardening he has achieved during that time still can't prepare him for what comes next. He is awkward and shy as a schoolboy at his first dance as he offers Fayth one red rose that he purloined from the back of the local florist's cooler. He tells her happy Valentine's day and nervously asks if she'd be his girl. She reminds him that she owes him a rain check for dinner, and if he's feeling up to it, tonight might work for her schedule. Carville would likely still "feel up to it" even if he had to staple his own belly closed and superglue his leg back on. He mentions that she reminds him of why he joined up in the first place, and leaves Fayth to her duties while he prepares for their date.

On arrival at the bunker, Fayth looks up Dr. Carbonelle, one of the biologists working on the alien autopsies. Fayth is his de facto point of contact, and the person to whom he and his team sends their findings. He has exciting news regarding their most recent specimen, the spider-monster from Westport (and the reason four members of the team are in the hospital and one is in the morgue). They call it a Chryssalid, and it seems to be the evolved form of the mutant life spread from the spoor carried by the meteors. Carbonelle and his team have finally been given enough pieces of the puzzle to solve that mystery. Furthermore, the small device carried by the aliens that caused neural activity in the decapitated Chryssalid specimen appears to be an avoidance beacon. Carbonelle and his team have come up with the theory that the Chryssalid is so hyper-aggressive and otherwise uncontrollable that even the aliens have had to develop a means to keep the terror beasts from attacking their own troops. Also, based on the autopsy findings, the biologists learn that a population of these creatures, if left unchecked, could wreak untold havoc on any environment. They will have to be dealt with, or the entire earth could be lost, swimming neck-deep in slashing claws and murderous chitin.

Fayth and Carville have their date, and because AJ and Marie are both wounded and in the hospital (and because Doug is off doing Doug-stuff), she has a private evening, free of interruptions in order to...well, that's none of your business. If she wants you to know how her date went, she'll tell you herself.

The next day, Marie is feeling well enough to hobble around. She checks in with the eggheads at the bunker, to see how the research projects she kick-started are going and to speak to Professor Jenkins. He has heard that the group is planning on undertaking a manhunt for more scientists and engineers, which he fully supports, and has taken it upon himself to compile exhaustive lists of contact information from himself and all the other eggheads. He hands this off to Marie, hoping this contribution might make a good starting point for the team so long after the initial attacks. By now, it will likely be difficult to find many of these people, but with the right information, the team might be able to find clues, and if they can find some of them, they might be able to find the rest, and then ply them for information on anyone else they might rescue.

Jenkins also confides in Marie that someone should really check up on Miss Faraday; Lillian Kjelstad has evidently granted the young lady sweeping access to the bunker, and it is rumored that she is performing salvage operations on the downed flying saucer south of the development park with no supervision or oversight.

This riles Marie up like nobody's business, and when she shares the news with AJ, Doug and Fayth, the men folk are equally displeased with the actions of Marie's mom. They see it as a direct breach of the agreements she made with them regarding Project personel. They asked for final say on all Project members, and as far as they can recall, Lillian didn't even ask them; probably because she felt their say would be "no."

This raises the dicey question: What are they going to do about it? Lillian Kjelstad is known to be surprisingly scrappy in an up-front fight, so they don't want to precipitate that sort of conflict, not without some range and backup. She is also devious, driven and scheming. They see her as the type of person who will stop at nothing to achieve her goals. They suspect she sees agreements made with others as nothing more than temporary concessions designed to gain the compliance of others.

They hem and haw for a while about their options, running the gamut from shutting Lillian out of the base until she answers for what she's done to shipping Faraday off to Antarctica. Before making any rash decisions or crossing any bridges that will surely be burned, the group decides to gather some more intelligence, and figure out what the key players are actually doing, try and discover their motives and whether they should be pissed off about it. After all, the world these days has become an uncertain place. It's easy to see people's actions out of context and decide they are being dodgy. If the team wants to make claims of responsibility, it behooves them to not jump to conclusions.

In the name of being responsible, they have Doug spy on Faraday with his drones. Since some of his spy-ops will likely take place during the day, he opts to get a couple of the scout drones camouflaged a bit better. He finds an artist in town, and sends the drones to his house. The meeting doesn't go well, and hilarity ensues. Realizing that the drones don't have hands to operate doorknobs, the startled artist slams the door in the drone's face and flees to the basement. Doug chooses not to pursue this one, and goes to the next name on his local artist list. Having learned from the past, Doug takes a different approach and meets with success. In a short time he has sky/woodland camo painted on two scout drones, which he sends out to the crash site that they have pretty much neglected after Operation Repo thanks in no small part to all the other stuff being thrown at them.

The artillery Doug called in on the small craft during the battle really did a number on the alien craft. The wreck is a broken mess, with little salvage available. Nearby is a small dugout cave where Faraday has been stashing items from the crash site. Her organizational system is meticulous and neat. Doug waits, knowing that Faraday comes out here almost every day now. She doesn't disappoint, and Doug watches her for several hours as she pores through the crash site, documenting her finds, photographing wreckage, collecting, sorting and stowing items. She pitches a tent, makes a small fire and camps out there overnight, giving Doug the opportunity to use his drone to scan her laptop. He sends the disk image to Marie to pore over.

Once Marie sifts through the disturbing amount of pornography on Faraday's computer, she snoops on her research, taking a keen interest in her personal notes, which (dammit all) don't seem scheme-y at all. In fact, Faraday even notes more than once that she needs to share certain finds with Marie to help her research. Faraday's secret helpfulness is rapidly taking the angry wind out of Marie's sails.

Next, the group conspires with the Rangers, placing Corporal Rabbit at the entrance to the bunker when Faraday comes to roost. Per their instructions, Rabbit is enacting new security protocols, and he denies her access to the bunker because she is not on the list of approved personnel. This frustrates Faraday, to say the least, at which point she spies Doug (conveniently) lurking nearby. She flags him down in hopes that he might rectify the situation. While the others were expecting him to confront her and interrogate her in some fashion, he instead hears her out and finds that she just basically wants to work for them. She is pretty up-front about what she's been doing once someone shows some basic interest in asking her, showing that she's not been secretive so much as people have been willfully ignoring her. She readily shares what information she has (most of which they have already stolen from her). Doug gets her access back into the bunker, she and Marie come to relatively peaceful terms with each other, and for now, the Faraday situation seems to be resolved without much confrontation or...exile.

Confronting Lillian is another matter, one the group has decided to table for now. With this potential trouble on the home front resolved, the group sets their eyes on their next mission...getting more fish in their think tank!